Verleger bemühen ja immer als Argument gegen Open Access, dass bereits jetzt ein Großteil der Literatur zugänglich wäre und OA keinen oder einen geringen zusätzlichen Nutzen hätte. Zwei Mails in liblicense (noch nicht online) beschäftigen sich jetzt detaillierter mit diesem Argument und zeigen seine Fadenscheinigkeit auf: Charles W. Bailey, Jr. weist auf einen besonders lesenswerten Artikel hin: Sharon Terry: In the public interest: Open access bzw. John Houghton, der anhand von drei Umfragestudien auf einen Prozentsatz von 50-75% an Forschern kommt, die Probleme beim Zugang zu Artikeln haben. Aus dem Artikel von Sharon Terry:
Coming into the medical research world from nonscientific occupations, […] Our first step was to understand what we were reading. We bought textbooks and dictionaries and taught ourselves this new language word by word. Although the United States wisely invests billions of dollars in biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), we discovered that the results are locked up in very costly annual journal subscriptions and institutional licenses that can cost thousands of dollars for a single journal, or made scarce by use-limiting, per-article charges that can run as much as $30 to read a single study.
We spent hours copying articles from bound journals. But fees gate the research libraries of private medical schools. These fees became too costly for us to manage, and we needed to gain access to the material without paying for entry into the library each time. We learned that by volunteering at a hospital associated with a research library, we could enter the library for free. After several months of this, policies changed and we resorted to masking our outdated volunteer badge and following a legitimate student (who would distract the guard) into the library. When that became too risky we knew we would have to find a way to access information in a more cost-effective and reasonable manner. (Hervorhebungen durch mich)